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The Witchwood Crown – Thoughts on the return to Osten Ard – Part 4

As I sit on Chapter 28 of 54 chapters in The Witchwood Crown, a few random observations:

Chapter Names

I mentioned this in the re-read and commentary eBook that I put together, but I’ll bring it up again. I normally never read the Chapter names in a book. Some authors keep it simple by naming the chapter at the PoV character (looking at you, Mr. GRRM!); some do not even bother with naming their chapters (guilty!). But I noticed during the re-read that Tad’s chapter names had either foreshadowing, humor or serious sarcasm in them.

The name of Chapter 28 made me think Tad was laughing when he pulled that one out of his…head. It conjures up many different images at once, and somehow made me think of the WerePig from the Bobby Dollar series!

The Appendix of The Witchwood Crown

There is a 15 page Appendix in To Green Angel Tower (which is 1,066 pages in hardback) versus a 25 page Appendix in The Witchwood Crown (which is 694 pages in hardback). Obviously the world of Osten And has grown, and/or Mr. Williams marching band of personal Scrollbearers did great research (perhaps a bit of both, and kudos to Ylva and Ron, great mentions in the Acknowledgements!). I’ve tried hard to stay out of the Appendix, for the same reason I’ve tried hard to stay away from other people’s reviews…no spoilers please!

The Back Cover Flap

To Green Angel Tower and The Witchwood Crown back cover flaps, side by side…I’ll just leave this image here. The Dogly one ages well!

Discussion

Thanks so much for the shout-out. We had so much fun compiling the Appendix; there were actually four of us involved on that project, not even including Tad (who had to write some of the definitions, as we didn’t know what was in his head). As you say, it’s clear from the Appendix that Osten Ard has grown, with a cast of people and a setting of places much larger than the original books. That realization didn’t hit us until we reached 300 character names: as many as in all of MS&T combined! We did try to avoid spoilers in the Appendix, as I don’t like them either.

The appendix gave me stinging eyes, a hurting back and it haunted me in my dreams. I am utterly proud of what we accomplished and was happy to do it but fun is not what I would call the experience.
To me the work on the manuscript was fun, pure pure bliss even but the appendix was work that needed to be done and when the deadline was looming I was on the verge of a nervous breakdown at times.

And as to chapter names: discussing the book on the mb (hope to see you there in about a week’s time considering your reading pace ;-)) I am annoyed that the book has no chapter index. I am a big fan of chapter indexes. And stupid me never brought up the issue to anybody when there was time to consider it because stupid me did not notice it was missing. Darn.